Mozilla Bug Week

Monday October 22nd, 2001

Many of you are familiar with the Bug Day's that we started a few years ago. Well, with the number of people wanting to help out skyrocketing these last few months, gerv@mozilla.org and others have decided that a bug week was in order. They'll be running it from Saturday October 27th to Sunday November 4th, and they'll have plenty of smart people on hand to help folks learn the bug system, learn how to use the various other web tools, and of course, learn some tips on how to contribute code to the Mozilla effort. Click the Full Article link to get all the details.

> I don't think there's anything wrong with open source in itself. I believe that the current problems are more or less because of Mozilla's development process, not open source. I believe that what's missing is the guts to define a bold target (3 years ago) and then go for that and not stray off the target. Now everyone is being a captain and everyone is steering in different directions. While some say "1.0 is needed" and write documents about why it's needed, others say "you're being silly. 1.0 is just a number. let's call it 1.0 now and be over with it". Without a person at the helm (like Linus Torvalds for example), it's very hard to get a coherent strategy and goal for the project. JWZ was that person in many ways. While he hadn't set a public 1.0 goal for one year after the initial release, that was clearly his personal goal and he left as a result of not being able to make that goal. Mozilla today is slowly improving but is very far behind the implicit schedules that people (end users, web developers and fans) expected. That wouldn't be so bad if we weren't also so far behind the performance (speed, size, stabilty, quality, market share etc.) that the same people expected and expect.

While myself I'm not able to find the exact reasons for Mozilla's long "time to market" (not appropriate term for such a project), I suspect you 're right. But even if all the above hold true, things would be easy if resources were sufficient. Open source people reluctant to work for a project targeted as the backbone of commercial applications? Insufficient documentation and complicated development environment? All I know is the lack of developers and bug triagers, that is is my impression from bugzilla and cvs. Proposed solutions ? Alas, I am not able to offer one...